Celigo (internal initiative)
Building Systems That Scale
Operational excellence through strategic process design
2022-2025 (Ongoing)
When I joined Celigo in 2022, the creative team operated without dedicated project management infrastructure (a common gap I'd previously encountered at Givelify). Rather than "managing the chaos," I recognized an opportunity to build systems that would eliminate it entirely. Drawing on patterns I'd learned working alongside project managers in my early years, I implemented a comprehensive work management system in Asana that transformed not just design operations, but cross-functional collaboration across the entire marketing organization.This wasn't about implementing a tool; it was about building the infrastructure for creative excellence at scale.
Roles, Tasks
Operations Strategy, Process Design, System Architecture, Change Management, Team Leadership, Data Analysis
The Operational Gap
Build a scalable work management system that provides visibility into team capacity, eliminates priority conflicts through data transparency, enables accurate resource forecasting, and reveals organizational bottlenecks that extend beyond the design team.
Without project management infrastructure, the creative team lacked visibility into workload, stakeholders made competing priority demands, time estimates were subjective debates rather than data-informed forecasts, and the organization couldn't identify where delays actually occurred in the workflow.
The pain points were systemic: leadership couldn't make informed resource decisions without workload visibility, the team was caught in the middle of competing stakeholder priorities, inaccurate estimates led to overpromising and underdelivering, and inefficient workflows meant designers spent more time coordinating than creating. Most critically, without data showing where delays actually occurred, the design team was often blamed for bottlenecks that originated elsewhere: in content creation, feedback cycles, and approval processes.
Strategic Approach
Certified Asana Ambassador and ICAgile Professional
Rather than imposing a top-down system, I began by observing. At Givelify, I had first identified these operational gaps and started building solutions by listening to team pain points and adapting agency-learned practices to an in-house context. At Celigo, I brought these learnings forward while remaining open to what this organization specifically needed.
The approach centered on transparency: if we made workload visible, priority conflicts would resolve themselves. If we tracked actual time data, estimates would become accurate. If we revealed bottlenecks, collaboration would improve.
The strategic foundation rested on four principles:
Data over opinions (tracking actual hours to inform estimates, not gut feelings), Transparency as empowerment (visible workload enables autonomous prioritization rather than requiring top-down mediation), Systemic problem-solving (revealing that tasks spent 12 days awaiting content versus 13 days in design shifted conversations from blame to collaboration), and Continuous improvement (using status flag analytics to identify optimization opportunities across the entire workflow, not just within the design team).
Process
The system orchestrates the complete workflow from intake through completion, using automation to eliminate manual coordination, data to inform decisions, and transparency to enable stakeholder self-service.
Smart Intake & Triage
Every design request flows through a conditional intake form that automatically creates tasks pre-populated with critical information. I triage all requests within 24 hours, verifying content access, adding data-informed time estimates using rolling 12-month averages, and flagging any missing information before work can begin. This eliminates 90% of the back-and-forth emails that previously delayed project starts.
Data-Driven Estimation
Time estimates aren't subjective—they're derived from over three years of actual logged hours across hundreds of projects. The system maintains rolling 12-month averages for every major deliverable type, which I use as benchmarks while factoring in project-specific complexity. This transforms conversations with stakeholders: "Why does this take 20 hours?" becomes "Here's the data showing this type of work averages 20 hours based on actual past performance."
Transparent Capacity Planning
Workload dashboards display each designer's allocation across weekly and monthly views, plotting all assigned tasks against estimated hours. During twice-weekly standups (replacing less efficient daily meetings), the team reviews capacity together. When conflicts arise—multiple stakeholders requesting expedited work—I simply direct them to view the dashboard themselves. If they can identify lower-priority work to defer, we can accommodate their request. This removes the design team from contentious priority negotiations entirely.
Bottleneck Analytics
Custom status flags track where time is actually spent throughout the workflow. The data revealed a critical insight: tasks spend an average of 12 days awaiting content, 10+ days awaiting feedback, and 7 days awaiting approval—versus 13 days in active design work. This visibility transformed organizational behavior. The conversation shifted from "Why is design so slow?" to "How can we all streamline our handoffs?"
My approach centered on a simple premise: the best creative operations are invisible to much of the organization, but transformative in their impact. Rather than creating processes that benefit only the design team, I built infrastructure that improved cross-functional collaboration, and systems that become more valuable over time. Great operations don't constrain creativity. They enable it, by removing friction from everything else.
Key Capabilities
The system encompasses automated intake and triage workflows, data-informed time estimation using rolling averages, capacity planning dashboards, bottleneck analytics, and continuous improvement frameworks that identify optimization opportunities.
The operational system combines multiple interconnected capabilities: conditional intake forms ensure complete information upfront, automations handle task routing and status updates, rolling 12-month averages inform realistic estimates, workload dashboards enable capacity planning, and status flag analytics reveal where time is spent throughout the workflow. This infrastructure doesn't just optimize the design team's efficiency—it transforms how the entire marketing organization collaborates, enabling data-informed prioritization, autonomous decision-making, and continuous improvement.
This project represents a truth about leadership that many overlook: operational excellence isn't just about efficiency—it's about enabling people to do their best work. The most satisfying outcome was hearing colleagues say they've never seen Asana used this effectively. Systems thinking isn't glamorous, but it's what separates teams that merely survive from those that thrive.
Impact & Results
"I'm floored by what you're doing in Asana. I've worked with Asana at other places and even on other teams within Celigo, and this is so advanced, so well done—such a well-oiled machine. This is really impressive."
– Colleague at Celigo
The system increased design team output by 238% while enabling 208 self-service marketing projects, saving 380+ hours annually through process optimization, and transforming organizational behavior through data transparency that shifted conversations from blame to collaboration.
The operational transformation delivered measurable impact across multiple dimensions. Design team output velocity increased 238% while maintaining quality standards that earned industry recognition (GDUSA Award, Gold ADDY). The team completed over 500 tasks annually with greater accuracy and efficiency than ever before. Specific optimization initiatives yielded substantial time savings across all deliverable types: 380+ hours saved year-over-year through continuous process improvements. Notable gains included e-book production time decreasing 27.8% (nearly 5 hours per book) through Gamma adoption, web navigation projects improving significantly, and video production becoming feasible in-house, using AI tools. Datasheet translations improved 65%, dropping from 4.25 hours to 1.5 hours average through better file management. Motion graphics work that previously required expensive external contractors became feasible in-house using AI video tools. Beyond optimizing the design team's workflow, the system transformed organizational behavior. By making bottlenecks visible—showing that tasks spent an average of 12 days awaiting content versus 13 days in design—the conversation shifted from "Why is design so slow?" to "How can we all streamline handoffs?" This data transparency enabled the marketing team to take ownership of their role in the process, resulting in 208 self-service projects through Canva and eliminating low-complexity work from the design queue entirely. The continuous improvement framework created a culture of operational excellence. Regular analysis of status flag data reveals optimization opportunities. When presentation creation time unexpectedly increased 15%, we identified it immediately and began investigating solutions—potentially implementing HubSpot's native landing page builder for greater self-service capabilities. Most importantly, the system scaled. As the marketing organization grew and demands increased, the infrastructure enabled the lean design team to absorb significantly higher workload without burning out. Meeting time decreased (replacing daily 15-minute standups with twice-weekly 30-minute sessions), coordination overhead vanished through automation, and stakeholders gained confidence in realistic timelines because estimates were grounded in actual data rather than subjective opinion.
Team output increase
Hours saved annually
